Willie Mays

by James S. Hirsch (Scribner; $30)

Nearly eighty now and almost blind, Mays has outlived most of the fans who actually saw him play, and survives in legend as the twenty-year-old Say Hey Kid, who electrified New York upon his arrival with the Giants, in 1951, and in the iconic photograph of that running-away catch at the Polo Grounds fence in the 1954 World Series. Hirsch’s deeply researched biography revisits (one feels) almost every at-bat of Mays’s twenty-two-year career, while demolishing the reductive clichés, and presents a grouchy and driven super-pro who more than once played himself into the hospital with exhaustion. Whether he or Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle was the greatest slugger of their vivid era (his six hundred and sixty homers stand fourth on the all-time list) can be argued, but his titles as the primo outfielder (“Willie Mays’s glove, where triples go to die,” the Dodger official Fresco Thompson said) and the possessor of the deadliest arm remain beyond question. The real debate, Hirsch suggests, is still whether Mays or Babe Ruth was the greatest player of all, and he leaves the enticing decision up to us. ♦

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